Writing Report April 4, 2020

Unless there’s an emergency or we need to move Soon-ok’s mom back to her apartment from the rehab hospital (she’s recovered from her fall but developed a mild case of flu -- not coronavirus, they tested for that -- so we’re waiting for the final okay), we’re not leaving the house until May except for tending our plots at the community garden (see previous post).

We did two last grocery runs on Friday (Costco) and this morning (Whole Foods) and we are as set as we’re gonna be for the rest of the month.  

Meat and dried foods / nuts we can get delivered through Butcher’s Box and Thrive, we’ve pared back our meals so we’re eating enough but not too much, the TV / radio / Internet are working, and even if those weren’t, we’ve got hundreds of books.

So we’re good.

Writing that makes me realize how luck and privileged we are in this situation.

Thanx to Soon-ok’s pension and our combined social security, we can get by comfortably.

We’re basically homebodies, so other than missing meetings of my writer’s group or the monthly Christian Comics Art Society meeting, or not being able to just pop out and go window shopping, we’re doing 85% of what we were doing before the pandemic.

There was a lengthy silence among the various markets where I’d sent my short stories when the lockdown started, but as people get a handle on working from home those publishing ventures that survived the initial lockdown are now getting back to contributors.

Some (as noted previously) have already imploded / dissolved / evaporated; I doubt seriously at this point they’ll come back in any form.

Others seem to be doing at least the courtesy of clearing their decks so nobody is left in the lurch, wondering what happened to their material.

The world after the coronavirus is going to be much, much different. 

Not in any big ways, such as the dystopian worlds of The Postman or Mad Max, but in myriad small / subtle / almost invisible ways that will add up to a huge cultural change.

This is not just one generation succeeding another (though the Boomers’ era of dominance has definitely ended, even if the tail of the dinosaur is still quivering), but a change in the way the entire culture perceives itself.

Print is dead, at least in its traditional form.

Oh, there will still be books published, but that’s going to be a secondary market for writers, a niche market the same way live stage shows ceased being the default mass market for of entertainment once movies and radio arrive but went on to have healthy lives aimed at more tightly defined audiences.

eBooks ala Kindle and various online forms of publishing are going to be the new mass market, and as either Mark Twain or Josef Stalin once said, “When it’s steamboat time, you steamboat.”

So I’m reallocating my writing efforts:
More will appear here in short form, if I find an online writing site that’s a good fit I may start writing there, books will still come out (hopefully at a faster pace than originally planned).

I’m not writing off (=snerk!=) games and media writing, but I’m not chasing those brass rings anymore.  Too many hoops to jump through.

(Though if somebody wants to hire me…)

Because of Soon-ok’s mom and other important-but-not-serious family business, as well as reorganizing our garden and preparing for the lockdown, my productivity took a major hit last month (and hasn’t really improved by this moment).

I am still writing, and shortly will transcribe a new fictoid for posting early next year, so the fires are still stoked, the motor’s still purring.

(Indeed, I finally got an insight into an idea I had decades ago that might very well be a perfect fit for some online writing site; more on that in months to come.)

Of course, if you follow Twitter or are on Facebook, the Internet is currently crawling with folks determined to start writing and / or finish that Great Novel / Screenplay they’d once begun.

There’s going to be a lot of competition out there, but I’m not going to worry about that.

The writers who truly succeeded, the writers who matter were the ones who wrote to please themselves and while happy to share their efforts with the world, would have kept on keeping on regardless.

I’m in that category (the “keep on keeping on” portion, that is).

It’s going to be a radically different world in 18 months.

David Brin (cited elsewhere; go read Duty Now For The Future) once observed that the great cultural leap forward happened between 1914 (the start of WWI) and 1919-20.

He cites kitchens as one of his cultural yardsticks:
The homemakers of 1900-1914 would have easily comprehended and been able to work in a 1880 kitchen…or an 1860…or 1840…or 1800…or 1700.

It wasn’t that radically different.

But by the early 1920s, while old style kitchens were still plentiful, they were dying out, replaced by newfangled electric kitchen with newfangled technology such as affordable consumer refrigerators instead of ice boxes, toasters, waffle irons, mixers, etc., etc., and of course, etc.

The jump in that five year span was greater than the jumps of the previous two centuries.

And the homemakers of 1920 -- as quaint and as antiquated and as inefficient as their “labor saving devices” were -- could easily understand the functions of a contemporary kitchen, even if the individual bells and whistles might prove a trifle confusing.

Ditto the office worker of 1900 to the office worker of 2020.  

We’ve sure got a lot more gadgets than they had, but they could grasp what a cell phone was used for because they had landline phones, they’d comprehend a desktop computer was a blend of typewriter and adding machine and tickertape and telegraph, Skype and Zoom would not be alien to anyone familiar with a party line.

The cultures of 1920 and 1990 are a lot closer than we imagine…

…but they’re also a lot different.

(I’d be remiss not to acknowledge there were other cultural changes that occurred after 1920 that drastically changed our world, and at some point in the future I’ll write on all that…but not today, not today…)

We’re about to see a big change in everything, and the future is going to belong not to those in one particular birth cohort or another, but to those who can see that future unfolding before them.

Catch you on the other side.

© Buzz Dixon